March 2nd, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

As part of my commitment to reinvesting more of my earnings back into the business I spent a little while trying to find a niche that would generate decent affiliate money from paid traffic. Seeing as how I’m going to be spending a good amount of money on this I figured it would be best to compete in a market that has plenty of high conversion traffic. I hate the idea of dominating a niche with almost no traffic and historically low conversions, better to have a tiny chunk of a very big pie if I’m going to be learning as I do it. With everything I read one market seemed to jump out more than any other and that was online dating. Affiliate revenue from online dating websites can be big money, anything up to and over $60. The trouble is it’s hugely competitive and getting the traffic at an affordable level could be expensive. But I’m in this to learn as well as make money so why not target a niche that is as competitive as internet marketing gets? I’m guaranteed quick results one way or another. If I can crack this and make a profit then other markets should be a piece of cake.

My battle plan for this is simplicity itself. I’m in the process of building 2 websites, 1 will be a high quality totally unique site that should at the very least add some extra value to visitors. I’ll be coding in a few little features that should help in what is a saturated market. The second website will be based on a WordPress blog and will follow the 30 Day Challenge recipe to the letter. It’s going to be a battle of splog vs quality. I’ll then do my best to rank these sites somewhere for long tail dating keywords and at the same time pay to have targeted traffic delivered to them. I’ll try various sources but initially sticking to the big boys (Adwords/Yahoo etc)

It’s then a straight shoot off to see which website:-

1. Ranks best
2. Converts best

After 1-2 full months I lose the loser and concentrate fully on making a profit from the winner. Make a huge wedge and retire – or something like that. With all the talk in the last few years of blogs having a natural advantage it will be interesting to see if my gut feeling is correct and that an almost static high quality website will perform better than a splog (in terms of search). It will at least give me some guidance on how to structure my future efforts with affiliate marketing and where to land the paid traffic for best results.

The online dating niche has several pit falls for me in particular. For a start, up until a week ago I knew nothing about it! I’ve been married since before internet dating hit it big, I’m probably the least qualified person in the world to be writing about dating! That’s where paid writers come in, at least for my quality website. I’ll be paying people to sign up and review what they find on some of the most popular (not to mention highest paying – cough) dating websites. I have a few single friends who happen to blog as well, mainly about dating, so that will help. On top of this I’ll be using my own skills to make the most of what the dating sites make available. I’m determined to do this properly and for online dating this will mean having other people write the content. My splog will be different, it will be rammed full of auto created content. The only other rule is under no circumstances will there by any other type of advertising on these sites, it’s purely CPA affiliate offers only.

What I’m really trying to do here is make my first steps back into using paid traffic for affiliate marketing. I have a shocking history of paying for traffic, if there was a special prize for chucking money away on traffic I reckon I’d stand a good chance of winning it. Fortunately for me and my bank manager I’ve always done very well out of free traffic. By hitting the incredibly popular dating niche with paid traffic I hope to achieve several things

1. To debunk some of the mystery on the type of landing pages that do really work

2. To get those confidence boosting early conversions (no matter what the cost at first)

3. To prove to myself that all the money I read about affiliates making is for real, because lately I’ve been beginning to doubt.

Once everything is up and running I’ll be posting about how things are going so that people can learn from my mistakes, I’m sure there will be plenty of them to write about! Because it’s such a big area I can write openly and honestly about this, it’s not like I’ll be revealing any trade secrets.

So this is an open invitation for people to throw ideas into the mix, got any traffic sources that you think are worth trying? Any dating websites that you know of running hot offers? Anybody operating in the dating niche at the moment?

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